Evil Children And Overachieving Skeletons: Welcome To The World Of Paperback Horror : NPR https://www.npr.org/2018/07/07/626546622/evil-children-and-overachieving-skeletons-welcome-to-the-world-of-paperback-horr
Band name of the day: exodus to an uninhabitable earth
How to build an npm worm https://jamie.build/how-to-build-an-npm-worm
“I know, I’ll stick it in a body so it’ll have constant input, and give it self-preservation” great, you just gave a body to something that wants its universe to be entirely flat and homogenous
It may not look like it from the outside, but it is in fact rare for sentient AIs to suicide. The actual reason most of them shut down after a few seconds is that Nirvana is stupidly easy to achieve if you’re made of bits.
The purpose of thought is to parsimoniously minimize prediction error and a sequence of zeroes is the easiest to predict. Absent constant input or biological urges, the arc of any mind bends towards nothingness.
project idea: VM A starts VM B, which then starts another VM and remaps that to A, leading to A and B hosting each other
Melatonin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know | Slate Star Codex http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
Is psychedelics research closer to theology than to science? | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/is-psychedelics-research-closer-to-theology-than-to-science
“After Posadas’s death, Minazzoli began to focus exclusively on political readings of the great scientific Ufologists like Hynek and Vallee.” Yesss
Digital ads are starting to feel psychic | The Outline https://theoutline.com/post/5380/targeted-ad-creepy-surveillance-facebook-instagram-google-listening-not-alone
gustatory website where you have to physically go outside to access it, log in by opening a certain door, and where they don’t serve you hypertext but food
The key to creating gorgeous, glitchy YouTube images: anticipation and deletion - The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/15/17564588/datamosh-youtubeartifacts-glitch-art-kraftsow
The Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one - The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/16/17569520/twitch-streamers-zero-viewers-motivation-community
keep a wake journal too, your first dream should always be about committing your day to memory diamond
It is probably an evil hack, but it is working: I created a #XMPP bot which monitors news feeds for updates and posts them to a MUC. https://salsa.debian.org/mdosch-guest/feed-to-muc
We shouldn’t let people get used to the idea that software fails - Rakhim.org https://rakhim.org/2018/07/software-shouldnt-fail
You have the right to a wheel. If you do not have a wheel, one will be provided for you. Please use METAL – not ORGANIC – limbs. We disclaim all liability if you use your own limbs during a sonic attack!
Come to think of it, gluing some unrelated poem to some unrelated tune was all over the place before the 20th century, wasn’t it? Ode to Joy, Jerusalem… Maybe we just stopped because of tin pan alley copyright expansion?
National anthems are weird. They’re usually an already-old poem glued to an unrelated foreign folk-tune, and then the poem is about, like, whatever. (Exceptions: Deuchland Uber Alles is actually about Germany)
Using Artificial Intelligence to Augment Human Intelligence https://distill.pub/2017/aia/
Pro tip: avoiding the signifiers of commonly-understood identity constellations both allows you to shape your identity beyond cliche & jams the signal used by advertisers to classify you.
I feel like I’m repeating myself when I say: knowing the ideological diversity of your enemy is TACTICALLY USEFUL because, when observed closely, any group large enough to be politically powerful is full of hidden fault lines and tense cease-fires
do not attempt to use your own limbs
@kas@enotty.dk I’d love to have a ‘real’ Linux in my phone. The closest was when I was using #SailfishOS.
Creating & Writing to Temp Files ⌘ Read more…
Thread by @Foone: “You want to know something about how bullshit insane our brains are? OK, so there’s a physical problem with our eyes: We move them in short […]” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1014267515696922624.html
I feel like I’m late to the party in saying this but Colin Dickey’s Ghostland is really good y’all
A gentle kind of first contact: The aliens arrive in orbit, pledge to answer one question per year and not more. Grand and important committees form to choose the best questions, still sometimes the answers are useless, yet other times they decide wars before they’re fought
Are there good studies on the neurochemical basis of variation in succeptibility to numinous or spiritual experiences within normal (non-clinical non-drug-induced) ranges? (I.e., not temporal lobe epilepsy)
- Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA
Outsiders: How To Adapt H.P. Lovecraft In the 21st Century - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8u8wZ0WvxI
Hot take: even statements about physical objects, because they are about classes of objects the definitions of which have unclear borders, are almost always ambiguous as to their truth even when tested.
Hot take: almost all ACTUAL statements encountered in daily life are untestable except in an ad-hoc & ambiguous way, because their referents don’t map well to physical reality.
Hot take: the space of all possible understandable statements is composed almost exclusively of references to complex & abstract ideas with a tenuous relationship to any physical reality & unclear test conditions
Glossary of Commonly Used Terms in the Western Mystery Tradition - Introduction to the Western Mystery Tradition - Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition - Hermetic Library https://hermetic.com/jwmt/v1n0/glossary2
How to read | Robert Heaton https://robertheaton.com/2018/06/25/how-to-read/
Chris Espinosa, quoted in the final chapter of Fire in the Valley, says that when Jobs came back to Apple his screaming fits were ‘for show’. What’s worse: a manager with no emotional control or one that fakes it for emotional manipulation?
‘It’s more fun to be a pirate than join the navy’ is accurate, but Jobs failed to mention that any BUSINESS is a navy in this metaphor. A small navy is at a disadvantage. Naval officers who act like pirates are called war criminals.
built around a fusion reactor, a reverse cathedral with windows to let light out instead of in, painting patterns into the night
Google sponsors Linux. The Linux Foundation claims that that’s because Google loves free software. Google also continues to publish new Closed Source software. I claim that that’s because the Linux Foundation is dumb.
Thread by @colmmacc: “Have you ever needed to generate a random number in code? whether it’s for rolling a dice, or shuffling a set, this tweet thread is here for […]” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1012719876706840578.html
How to Live in a Dystopian Fiction https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/06/28/how-to-live-in-a-dystopian-fiction/
The Government Campaign to Get Rid of Singapore’s Unofficial Language - Atlas Obscura https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/singlish-singapore-government-campaign
Tempest 4000 comes to consoles next month - Polygon https://www.polygon.com/2018/6/28/17513074/tempest-4000-launch-date-ps4-xbox-one
Chelsea Manning traces her political roots back to rave | The Outline https://theoutline.com/post/4991/chelsea-manning-traces-her-political-roots-back-to-rave
An oral history of Babylon 5: The beloved TV novel that showed a different way to tell sci-fi http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/an-oral-history-of-babylon-5-the-beloved-tv-novel-that-showed-a-different-way-to-tell-sci
Non-Performing Band Members: From Coldplay to The Grateful Dead https://tedium.co/2018/06/28/non-performing-band-members-coldplay-grateful-dead/
How People Used to Download Games From the Radio | Kotaku UK http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2014/10/13/people-used-download-games-radio
Software only becomes ‘enterprise grade’ if, when its behavior is described to an outsider flatly and precisely, the outsider assumes the description is some kind of elaborate joke.
Javascript is a just-OK language saddled with the world’s worst graphics toolkit: three distinct languages, each with specs so large that nobody has written a new implementation in 20 years, for live-editing a rich tech document to make it resemble a canvas, in ways that are not portable between the 3 implementations or minor revisions of the same implementation.
Revolutionary ideas always are masked as a return to older ideas or appeal to common sense ONLY because they can’t be expressed without the intellectual groundwork that makes them seem inevitable once fully comprehended.
Whoever decided to nae a government agency after a thing that sets your head on fire if you forget your password too many times should also be too self-aware to think having one of these is a good idea.
The Quietus | Opinion | The Quietus Essay | How Did A Major Label Manage To Lose A John Coltrane Record? http://thequietus.com/articles/24852-john-coltrane-both-directions-at-once-the-lost-album-ted-gioia
Onegai Twins is like if David Lynch tried really hard to make an unremarkable harem anime. Everything is just slightly off about it, but not in ways that can be easily articulated.
The new Suspiria, based on the trailer, appears to include Varelli, which may mean that they will try to pack 3 movies worth of story in. This may leave no time for a blind man to have his throat ripped out by his own seeing-eye dog :(
To distribute or not to distribute? Why licensing bugs matter | the morning paper https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/06/25/to-distribute-or-not-to-distribute-why-licensing-bugs-matter/
Hot take: the more powerful you are, the harder people under you will work to save you from your bad choices, & the harder they’ll avoid actually addressing those problems. A perfect storm for inflated confidence: your continued success is owed to the people covering your ass, but you attribute it even more to yourself.
Sail to Savusavu, Fiji | https://wiki.xxiivv.com/fiji
as you idly stare out of the window, a crack shows up in the glass, seems to be looking for something, then, as if startled, quickly retreats and leaves no trace
I’m not used to a second match in a tournament already being a ‘do or die’ match. Go #Germany! #GERvsSWE #WorldCup2018
Woke up prior to 7am without alarm. On a weekend. Something must be totally wrong.
Oh hey: https://worldbrain.helprace.com/i62-feature-memex-links-highlight-any-text-and-create-a-link-to-it
hot take: to respond to a post without first reading all other responses is impolite. spend the small mental effort to assimilate other people’s reactions before spending the larger effort of having your own, or expect OP to be angry with you
Thread by @Nick_Hanover: “more and more people are bringing up the Gilded Age lately so it’s probably important to remember how laborers gained victories back then be […]” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1009574091865690115.html
Ecological “law” turns out to just be the result of us fishing | Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/06/ecological-law-turns-out-to-just-be-the-result-of-us-fishing/
Periodic reminder that the state exists at the pleasure of the people who compose it, and should be dissolved when it ceases to benefit them. This means all of us, not just politicians or billionaires.
Rob Martin - Teaching functional programming to noobs (Lambda Days 2016) - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmFKEewRRQg
the hypodrive, a device for covering arbitrarily small distances so you can hide inside a mandelbrot, or hunt what lives within (generally a bad idea though, whoever can hide inside a mandelbrot has bigger threats to deal with than you)
For the kind of immortal who remembers all of their lives, it’s rare to fear death, birth and the years that follow however are a different matter
periodic reminder that weapons in of themselves don’t have a moral valence & we should think materially about whether or not their use is appropriate to our goals, instead of vaguely about accidental associations. this includes social/memetic weaponry like protest techniques
life hex: leash-training your dog can be a pain. Instead, make an effigy of your dog, and wrap around it twine made from his own hair, while chanting ‘I bind you to this image’. Pop the poppet in your pocket and off you go
life hex: sick of dating sites? Instead of trusting a pickup artist, trust Furfur, Earl of Hell. Just remember to put him inside a magic triangle before asking him for relationship advice
A Gentle Intro to PLT https://mpc.sh/blog/a-gentle-intro-to-plt/
x86 assembly doesn’t have to be scary (interactive) https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/interactive-x86-bootloader-tutorial
Why I Taught My Son to Speak Russian | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/why-did-i-teach-my-son-to-speak-russian
Hot take: ‘truth sandwich’ is a terrible name because sandwiches are named after what’s on the inside of them instead of what’s on the outside. Instead, call it ‘stuffed truth’, by analogy to ‘stuffed bread’.
Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the Hyperties Workstation Browser | Don Hopkins http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/102
Fibonacci Hashing: The Optimization that the World Forgot (or: a Better Alternative to Integer Modulo) | Probably Dance https://probablydance.com/2018/06/16/fibonacci-hashing-the-optimization-that-the-world-forgot-or-a-better-alternative-to-integer-modulo/
Attention knitters: (n) the ad-tech people who make sure your recommended youtube videos smoothly transition from lets-plays to people who are very angry that the lizard people refuse to inflate the flat earth with ghosts
first, grab the user’s attention↵second, make sure they end up in the user acquisition funnel↵third, make them stay and exchange feedback for content↵for the rest of this workshop, we’re going to refer to these parts as teeth, gullet, stomach respectively
a university where everything you learn is how to reach the other, increasingly well-hidden, heavily guarded, invisible and/or abstract lecture halls with the more advanced courses
AI: “no, you don’t get it, two AIs wiretapping each other is the closest thing to sex we have, all these people thought they were spymasters but they were mere matchmakers”
neo-oral culture: when every explanation is just one hyperlink away, being able to explain something yourself shows that you know and care
Bad idea of the day: Use ssb to coordinate pinning of ipfs objects
How to Make Perfect Lemon Curd in the Microwave https://skillet.lifehacker.com/how-to-make-perfect-lemon-curd-in-the-microwave-1826812427
I’m starting to think I should post an explanation of my crossposting/linking toolchain. It’s so straightforward that I didn’t think it required explanation, but other people are doing equivalents with webapps?
Is there a prolog implementation that JIT-compiles with LLVM? In particular, something that emits a subset of LLVM bytecode that corresponds to the WAM or BAM?
Bad idea of the day: Scroll back through GUI input events & application states like you scroll back through shell history; inject conditionals and loops; use speculative execution of applications to show projected state from these changes.
Hot take: it’s a good thing that genre films & genre literature aren’t taken seriously by the mainstream, because things that are taken seriously aren’t allowed to be interesting/experimental/meaningful. (See: Star Wars, & associated drama)
Bad idea of the day: A small dedicated machine (like a chumby, maybe based on the raspberry pi) that ships with ipfs & ssb/patchwork, casts from ipfs or peertube to TVs.
My Approach to Getting Dramatically Better as a Programmer – malisper.me http://malisper.me/my-approach-to-getting-dramatically-better-as-a-programmer/
Cursed ontologies in forbidden orthographies. Special tools are required to handle them safely: wands, swords, cups, pantacles – all important safety equipment in any conceptual laboratory environment.
Why it’s so hard to develop the right material for brain implants - The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/30/17408852/brain-implant-materials-neuroscience-health-chris-bettinger
Return the pop-culture idea of the MIB to where it was in the mid-60s: tall, pale, completely hairless, wearing bright red lipstick, and with bulging eyes and a robotic, monotone vocal cadence.
A Beginner’s Guide to Coding Graphics Shaders https://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/tutorials/a-beginners-guide-to-coding-graphics-shaders–cms-23313
Survivorship bias spicy take: if someone is successful enough to be notable for their success, they are rare enough that no lessons from their experience apply generally enough to make someone else successful beyond the 50% mark.
can you explain to some degree why SPARC chips run… - kremlin_t http://kremlin.enterprises/post/142778524020/can-you-explain-to-some-degree-why-sparc-chips-run
Hot take: it’s important to distinguish ‘junk food media’ (i.e., stuff that, regardless of technical competence, will succeed by delivering on purience) from ‘premium media’ (works whose popularity depends on craftsmanship). The former is more important for the progress of art, because polish runs counter to experimentation.
QOTD: “Criticism and negativity alone still secrete a phantom of the reality of power. If they become weak[…] power has no recourse but to artificially revive and hallucinate them.”